1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic dictionary and, more particularly, to an electronic dictionary which receives first language information and outputs second language information corresponding to the first language information.
2. Related Background Art
Hitherto, an electronic dictionary, an electronic translating apparatus, or the like have been known. In such a kind of apparatus, for instance, Japanese words, sentence, or the like are input and the words or a sentence translated in foreign language such as English or the like are displayed and output. The process to convert the first language information into the second language information is executed by a microprocessor by searching a memory in which the first and second languages are correspondingly stored with respect to the first language information. As a method of outputting the language information, a display output such as a liquid crystal display or the like is provided. However, a method using a voice output or the like is also considered. Therefore, a consideration will now be giving to an electronic dictionary constructed as an English/Japanese Dictionary. As the simplest electronic dictionary, there has been known a dictionary in which an English word is input and one Japanese word having the meaning corresponding to the input English word is output. However, there is also considered an apparatus in which the information relative to the input English word, for instance, if it is a verb, its conjugation, synonyms, antonyms, and the like are output. For example, such an apparatus has also been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,159,536 issued to Kehoe et al. and U.S. Ser. No. 878,748.
In the case of outputting such relative information, there is considered a method whereby information indicating whether the relative information exists and is stored in the memory and when certain language information is searched and output, the information relative to the language information is searched and output in accordance with a predetermined operation. On the other hand, there is also considered a method whereby if the searched language information has relative information, such information is output by again executing a predetermined operation.
According to such a method of tracing the tree of relative information, the relative information can be successively searched by one operation without needing the troublesome operation to turning over the pages of an ordinary dictionary one by one, so that it is very convenient. However, on the contrary, in a system which has conventionally been considered, the search history is limited to the information just previously searched. Therefore, there are problems such that the operator cannot know which word he or she wanted to first search and the relation between relative words which are sequentially output becomes unclear.